On Wednesday Nic announced the 5th beta release.

The fifth build of the Spiceworks 5.0 beta is now available for you to try. Testing and feedback from you is an integral part of every release cycle and we appreciate the time and effort you put into giving us the feedback. In addition, you’ll be sure that the final release is a seamless upgrade for you.

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So what’s really new in this beta?

As with anything that Spiceworks do they have exceeded the expectations for this beta with some great new features/bug fixes and updates.

People View

The people view is one of the major things being added in Spiceworks 5.0 and we are getting close to seeing a fully working version.

• New Data Ribbon to allow you to see the more important information about a person at a glance. This is a great addition and allows you to quickly navigate though your user’s and find the information you want fast. As you build up your people view this cool overview will quickly allow you to work out where the user is, who the supervisor is for when they annoy you and what machine they use.
• This build now allows you to write / sync your changes back to active directory. Allowing you to quickly and effectively manage all your user’s from one place. You can change simple bits of information like number, location and department at the moment but soon you will be able to reset passwords and enable and disable accounts.

• You can now upload pictures of “avatars” to user’s to work out who’s who quicker. Keeping track of your user’s can be a pain, but with this build your able to upload a picture to user as an avatar on the people view and soon maybe the inventory and helpdesk view so at a glance you know who you are dealing with.
• Bug: Importing from AD into People View fails if LDAP connection does not work – fixed
• You are not able to delete people from the people view at the moment but this is planned for a future build.
• One thing I didn’t like about the people view is the location of the edit button, it took me a couple of minutes to find it but once found its in a nice location but maybe need to be made more visible as I can see a lot of people missing it when they first look.

The people view is really coming along well and over time it will be a great way of managing your user and their desktops.

Purchasing

Another great addition to Spiceworks 5.0 is the purchasing area to help you manage what’s you are buying and who for. In this release you can:

• Add new purchases from both the purchases and inventory pages.
• You can now tab between the fields on the purchasing page, before it jumped all over the place, this build its nice and smooth process.
• At the moment you still can’t delete purchases this is set to be in a future build.

Remote Helpdesk

The remote helpdesk feature has been enhanced to allow you to manage the tickets better when the central helpdesk is down. When the remote site detects that the central server is down or unavailable it holds all the email tickets until the connection is re-established. This ensures that all your tickets are processed and not lost of only visible at the remote site.

Plugins

By default there is a new widget, “Ink and Toner” this allows you to quickly see your toner / ink levels for printers, setup warning threshold’s and create purchases straight from the widget when needed. This will be very useful for companies finding it hard to keep track of toner/ink levels on multiple printers in lots of locations.

That’s all for now

Links

• 5.0 Beta V Build Now Available (5.0.55563)
• See All 5.0′s “Next-Frontier” Features Here
• 5.0 Test Plan
• 5.0 Testing Guidelines

Unofficial Reviews

• Beta 1
• Beta 2
• Beta 3
• Beta 4
• People View
• Additional Plugin APIs

Spiceworks 5.0 is set to be HUGE with some major new features being added, but there are also some smaller features in the background being added to help slim down the amount of feature requests and help keep user’s happy.

One of the things they are adding is the ability to add plugins to the User Portal this has been kick started with the ability to add the Ticket Gauge to the user portal with the “User Portal Ticket Gauge” plugin.

This allows your users to quickly see how many tickets you have to work on and will help give them an idea of how busy you are.

Once you have added the plugin to the portal, as with any widget you can move it around and even edit the points for when it changes yellow and red.

When Spiceworks 5.0 is fully release we will hopefully see more people create some nice widgets / plugins for the portal. There are already a lot of people using iFrames to add things like weather, news and other bits and bobs, its going to be a very useful feature and we expect to see some awesome new creations.

Links

• 5.0 Beta IV Build Now Available (5.0.55210)
• See All 5.0′s “Next-Frontier” Features Here
• 5.0 Test Plan
• 5.0 Testing Guidelines

Reviews

• Beta 1
• Beta 2
• Beta 3
• Beta 4
• People View

Jenn (Unitrends) just announced the cool Unitrends website to show off all the adverts the community has made

What started off as a conversation about a funny looking ad has evolved into a contest to see who can do better. The creator of the winning ad will receive a $50 Visa gift card, a Unitrends swag bag, and their ad will run on Spiceworks!

Read more

Good luck to all the contestants, you can checkout the entries on the community here
or on the unitrends ad contest page here

It wasn’t the beta’s fault it didn’t work I needed to use user@domain.local rather than domain\user simple fix and once changed it was up and running within 2 minutes with all my active directory users imported. Read my community discussion on this if you get stuck.

First off in some of I have omitted names and some details. The information was there just to be safe and to protect the ID of people I have covered it up.

Once you have the active directory settings correct and it syncs you will instantly start to see how the people view will help you.

If you already use the department field for user’s Spiceworks will recognise this and spilt your user’s up automatically for you, if you don’t everyone will just be put into the “no department” group for you to sort out if you so wish to do so.

The look and feel is no different from my last review for the people view but it feels so much better having all my user’s in there, I have some data to start looking at and playing with.

Although at the moment it doesn’t sync these changes back to active directory (it should do in the next beta drop) it’s still a great insight into just what you will be able to do with it in the future.

That’s about all I have to say about it for now, as it grows ill continue to let you know what the changes are and how you can use it to make your day easier.

Links

• 5.0 Beta IV Build Now Available (5.0.55210)
• See All 5.0′s “Next-Frontier” Features Here
• 5.0 Test Plan
• 5.0 Testing Guidelines

Reviews

• Beta 1
• Beta 2
• Beta 3
• Beta 4

The fourth build of the Spiceworks 5.0 beta is now available for you to try out. Testing and feedback from you is an integral part of every release cycle and we appreciate the time and effort you put into giving us the feedback. In addition, you’ll be sure that the final release is a seamless upgrade for you.

This build has some major and exciting changes and throughout this article I will walk you though as many of them as possible (some of them need Rackspace services in which I do not currently have).

Interface

The first thing that will hit you when you open up this build of Spiceworks is the new interface, it has been near completely redesigned (it’s still being worked on and could change again). This new layout is designed to make Spiceworks easier to navigate as well as making it easier to view your data.

Rather than the navigation being down the side it’s now at the top in drop down style menus. These seem to work really fast and with the performance fixes in this new GUI clicking from page to page is a lot quicker even compared to the earlier beta.

Once past the initial looks you will notice at the moment at least most of the views look the same, the helpdesk, reports and dashboard. The biggest change is the network map, with the new layout there is a HUGE amount of room for the map. Allowing you to quickly view all your devices and troubleshoot bottlenecks and problems.

You may also notice the new plugins notification button on the toolbar at the bottom of the screen this now shows you featured plugins as well as ones requiring updates.

Rackspace Stuff

Rackspace services have long been integrated with Spiceworks now and with 5.0 that integration gets even tighter.

In the people view you can now import user’s from a Rackspace IT Service, there is a new tab that has been added to the user’s lower panel. This is so that when navigating your user’s you can see there mailbox status at the same time.

Rackspace users with Reseller accounts will only see the main reseller customer account imported into People View. All additional customer accounts will not be imported.

The last bit of new integration is the ability to view your distribution groups and who is in them from within the Rackspace IT Service area.

All very exciting stuff if you have Rackspace hosted email, hopefully in the future we will also see some integration like this from other suppliers.

Helpdesk

When you are using remote collectors as remote helpdesk’s there is/was an issue about what to do when the connection to the central server was lost. Spiceworks have started to work on ways around this issue by adding in support for the remote helpdesks to be self-sufficient when the connection is lost. At the moment it just displays a customizable error message on the user portal but in the near future it will also hold the emails until the connection is restored to then send them on.

This is still being worked on and not all of it is fully working, but in the next beta we should have most of they should have most of this working.

Purchasing

The purchasing area of Spiceworks has been re-implemented in this beta, it has a new view and looks very smart.

You can quickly add things you need to buy to tickets and then check them out in the new purchasing view and follow them through the process of Approval, Purchasing and receiving.

It’s very easy to edit the details, add a vendor, code / area and price.

If you are trying to find the right product you can use the click links to search the community, compare prices on pgpartner or jump into the CDW shop.

Community

To help make things smoother between Spiceworks and the community also to encourage more people to take part the method to connect between the two has been changed. This is designed to help make sure you stay logged in between the two easier.

The biggest thing about this change is that you are now able to connect more than one install to a single community account. This is really useful for people with lots of remote sites or clients they need to help manage.

Another thing this has allowed is for you to do is to change your community email address yourself.

Note: that this email change is not a test, and will actually change your community email account. If you are changing your email address as a test, remember to change it back again using the same procedure.

People View

I held onto this one till last, mainly as it didn’t appear to want to work first time, and well it’s still not working. I don’t get if Nic’s comment means it should or shouldn’t be working for AD

Import users that have email addresses from Active Directory. There is a new Active Directory Configuration page under Settings to manage Active Directory. You’ll see a check box for syncing changes from Spiceworks back to Active Directory, but this function is not yet enabled. It will be enabled in a future Beta build.

So for now I’ll refer you to my last review and promise when I get it working ill review the new and exciting active directory integration.

Update: The people view review is up for you to checkout.

Links

So that’s all for now, keep an eye out for when I get active directory people view working and here are some helpful links.

• 5.0 Beta IV Build Now Available (5.0.55210)
• See All 5.0′s "Next-Frontier" Features Here
• 5.0 Test Plan
• 5.0 Testing Guidelines

Going into great detail on the install, configuration and troubleshooting.

The Spiceworks software as a less than 25 Mb download file (as of now) could be downloaded from the www.spiceworks.com. The same executable is inclusive of all basic requirements for Spiceworks that includes the SQLite database for storing settings-n-stats and Apache web server (need to check if installations already there to avoid conflicts).

Read the rest of his write up on his blog “A Step by Step Guide about Spiceworks”

Lawrie Dalman (Lawrie5252) (checkout his blog posts) is one of the first to start making reports. Aimed at the MSP market it allows you to see what you have purchased for your customers within the last 30 days. A very useful report to track what you have sold to who.

Purchases by Customer for 30 days (Spiceworks 5.0 Beta 3 and later)
Our first offering of a report written for Spiceworks 5.0 (Note: this report relies on tables and fields only available from version 5.0 and higher).

Read more

So pop on over to the reports section of the community and download it now.

Spread-Spiceworks was originally a very rubbish website until about 4 months ago when I picked up an idea i started ages ago. It now provides community members with dynamic badges they can use on there websites, email, forums and more to promote Spiceworks and gain points.

This morning it grew some more with the addition of MSP badges, a growing percentage of community users are from MSP companies and using these badges could help draw in some business, or points in the community or both. With 6 designs to choose from and more coming soon you should find something you like.

Checkout the other designs on Spread-Spiceworks.org.uk today!

Thanks to Lawrie5252 for helping with the designs and coming up with the idea.

What started off as a conversation about a funny looking ad has evolved into a contest to see who can do better. Take your best shot at making an ad for Unitrends – the winner gets a $50 Visa gift card, a Unitrends swag bag, and their ad will get run on Spiceworks.

Enter here! Entries have to be in by the end of August.

There have already been some GREAT entries into the competition. Make sure you enter as well.

So make sure you enter now for your chance to win $50 on a visa gift card!

Checkout the other entries and enter here

Thank you again to everyone who took the time to create an entry! After serious deliberation by the selection committee, we have the finalists selected. Once our designers have had a chance to do some minor post-production work on the ads, we’ll run them live on sites that we advertise on. The ad that works the best in each category will be the winner.

The five finalists in the graphical ad category are:

• James3977
• Striker090871
• Don Whitehead
• EDB
• akp982

In the text ad category:

• Jaguar
• Bart894
• Lawrie5252
• EDB

Checkout the finalists and more info on the community